U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,649,703 and 7,400,463, and U.S. patent application US2011/0090580, disclosed a lens driving apparatus which has a pair of leaf springs. The first leaf spring is attached to the first end of the lens holder (or someone called it lens carrier, tubular lens holder, etc), while the second leaf spring is attached to the other end of the lens holder. Magnets and coil are installed spatially between these two leaf springs and surrounding the lens holder. Such structure has become the mainstream technology in the market today. However, such structure is very troublesome for assembly, and the performance of spring suspension system and electromagnetic force generator can only be measured after the complete lens driving apparatus is assembled. Therefore, if low performance of either the spring suspension system or the electromagnetic force generator will cause entire failure of the lens driving apparatus, and thus lead to a substantial loss of raw materials.
Furthermore, such structure is normally assembled individually and this leads to a higher portion of the labor cost in the cost structure of such a lens driving apparatus. Recently, U.S. patent application US2011/0299181 disclosed a novel concept of a lens driving apparatus, which is composed of components which are made in planar form, such as coil, magnets, spring, etc. The whole lens driving apparatus can be assembled by laminating all planar type components one on top of the others. Furthermore, it further disclosed that such planar form components can be panelized so that the laminating assembly process becomes batch processing, and many lens driving apparatuses can be assembled all together at one time on the same panel. This laminating process will help to reduce labor cost significantly.
However, the disclosed laminating structure is directly applied to lens assembly unit, not lens holder. Therefore, every different lens assembly unit (for example, lens assembly units from different lens companies) has to have its corresponding tailor design of laminating lens driving apparatus. This will increase the difficulty of adoption of such lens driving apparatus in the market. Furthermore, the US patent application US2011/0299181 did not disclose the panelized component structure design and components panels.
The above description of the background is provided to aid in understanding the lens driving apparatus, but is not admitted to describe or constitute pertinent prior art to the lens driving apparatus, or consider the cited documents as material to the patentability of the claims of the present application.